eGovernment Like its 1994

Dave Fletcher also reports that the Utah State Legislature has made district profiles available online. Bless their hearts, they try to get this eGovernment stuff, but they're just not with it enough to do a good job and their too proud to ask for help. So they end up with a site with some great information on it that almost entirely unusable. Why in the world wouldn't you make it easy, inside this application, for someone to identify their legislative district. This also seems like the kind of information that ought to be in HTML, not PDF. I fear that this is one of the huge challenges of eGovernment that is largely ignored: there's not one reason for them to try to build a usable site. They'll never get a product manager or do a focus group. Even reading a book is perhaps too much to ask. As long as they can say in a news blurb "we're doing eGovernment," no one will notice that its ill conceived and poorly designed. You'll notice that they can't even use the utah.gov domain name since that's too closely aligned with the executive branch.